TV Overnights: Abundance of Talent results in a strong night for ITV1
The top shows of Wednesday night offered an equal balance of scripted drama, ‘reality’ television and there was even some room for a spot of football! Emmerdale (7pm) attracted the first significant audience of the evening for ITV1, in which Zac Dingle’s mental health slipped a little further in the wrong direction. 6.5 million people watched as the police broke the news to his family that he had been lying about his terminal cancer. Zac ended up wandering the moors, attempting to bury a wad of cash, pulling in an impressive audience share of 32%.
At the same time over on Channel 5 was the Live UEFA League Football final between Atlético Madrid v Athletic Bilbao with Jim Rosenthal filling up air time for 45 minutes. The two Spanish sides went head-to-head from the National Arena in Bucharest with a 7:45 kick-off; an average audience of 1.4 million viewers stayed tuned for the entire live coverage and analysis. The audience peaked half an hour into the game (at 1.9 million viewers) just as Falcao scored a goal for Atlético Madrid, helping them on their way to a clean 3-0 victory.
The moment the nation has been dreaming of for the past 12 weeks is finally in sight; the end is nigh for the UK’s premium talent show. And just in case the recent twice-weekly offerings of Britain’s Got Talent (7pm) aren’t enough, the viewing public is being spoiled with a whopping hour and a half each evening of live semi-finals all this week. So much talent there’s hardly room in ITV1’s schedule for anything else. And it’s hard to blame them when looking at the figures.
As if overkill is simply an obscure Marvel comic series, last night’s episode brought in 8.9 million viewers, up from 7.8 on Tuesday but not reaching Monday evening’s height of 9.4 million. All this leads into Saturday’s show, definitely the final, which will see the many innocents dropped back into the void of obscurity while one lucky person/group will be crowned the bestest dancer/singer/person in a gold suit in Britain. Last night’s epic slice of cleansing of the mediocre nabbed a 38% share.
Over on BBC One Lord Sugar’s sitcom The Apprentice (9pm) repeated the formula for an eighth week in row. Last night Team A and Team B were pitched against each other in a well urban twist – selling modern art. Viewers knew they were in for a special treat as Tom Gearing and his constant vacant expression took control of his team, simply because he was proper street and mentioned Banksy frequently. It really was anyone’s guess which team would mess this task up the most but all signs were pointing to Team Phoenix being out of their depth as they chose to represent an artist named Pure Evil. The episode was down on last week’s outing but only by 200,000 viewers, with a total of 5.9 million people tuning in for the weekly cringe-fest.
Coronation Street After Dark continued as Terry Duckworth’s evil plans came in to fruition. Even though Britain’s Got Talent has pushed the UK’s number 1 soap past the 9pm watershed for the entire week it was still business as usual in Weatherfield. The week’s quota of a murder and arson attempts were fulfilled as Tina stumbled upon Tommy, intent on carrying out his father’s plans to burn down the strip club. 7.9 million viewers watched as Tina was put through yet more emotional and physical trauma than any of us would wish to see in our lives, netting a 30% share.
Afterwards ITV1 gave us more talent show goodness with Britain’s Got Talent Results at 9:30pm. A tidy 7 million people came back to see which of the prestigious acts would make it back for the final (BTW, it’s all over on Saturday), catching a 27% share of the audience.
Overnight data is available each morning in mediatel.co.uk’s TV Database, with all BARB registered subscribers able to view reports for terrestrial networks and key multi-channel stations.